Tag: recruiting interview

This a tale of caution when recruiting. Ebenezer tells us the story of a person that was hired after a flawless interview process. He knew everything, all the answers. But in practice things did not work as well as in the interview. We discuss questions to ask that might help detect when people’s knowledge is not in line with their practice, and other recruiting techniques.

About Ebenezer Ikonne

Technology enthusiast. Change artist. Culture hacker. People focused. Helping organizations provide their employees with the most meaningful and fulfilling experience they could have while delivering solutions that change the world. Ebenezer is also a Tech Director at Mannheim.
You can link with Ebenezer Ikonne on LinkedIn, and contact Ebenezer Ikonne on Twitter. You can also read his thoughts on Agile on his blog.

There are many mistakes we make when recruiting, and Gil describes a good number of those mistakes. Recruiting is a skill that no one teaches you, but Gil shares with us what he has learned over the years

About Gil Zilberfeld

For over 20 years, Gil has developed, tested, managed and designed software products. He’s gone through failures and successes, in different types of projects and companies.
He has trained and coached developers how to write tests for their untestable code. He has worked with testers on complex applications and with very tight deadlines. He’s helped release products that fit customer needs, by testing the waters, and getting their feedback integrated. He has implemented agile, kanban and lean principles and adapted them to fit teams better.
You can link up with Gil Zilberfeld on LinkedIn, or find Gil Zilberfeld on Twitter.Gil is writing a book on Unit Testing. Check it out.

Sure, CV and experience matter. But there’s something that matters more when hiring a Scrum Master. In this Episode we discuss what matters more than experience for Scrum Masters as well as how to integrate that into your recruiting process.

About Matthias Seul

Matthias worked 10+ years as software developer and gravitated towards coaching in recent years. He is a tech enthusiast, board gamer, inventor and wild duck. Matthias believes in intrinsic motivation – thus he believes in Agile. He says that “together we can make projects a more fulfilling and successful work environment for all involved”.
You can link up with Matthias Seul on LinkedIn, and reach Matthias Seul on twitter. Matthias is interested in your questions and feedback, and you can reach him via email as well.

Hiring good people is hard, and hiring good Scrum Masters is no exception. To start with, the role of Scrum Master is very recent (started around 2000), and therefore we don’t have enough accumulated experience in the community, and all the good Scrum Masters are happily employed. But that’s not the only difficulty when hiring good Scrum Masters. How do you hire good people if the role is supposed to render itself obsolete? We tackle this and other questions that make hiring Scrum Masters hard.

About Juha Heimonen

Juha is a entrepreneur, programmer, kanbanista and a unicorn. He calls Software a garden, and says that he tries to be a gardener tending the soil as well as the specific plants.
He is active in the local agile community in Jyväskylä, Finland and also quite active on twitter.
You can link up with Juha Heimonen on LinkedIn and connect with Juha Heimonen on twitter.
You can find out more about his thoughts on Fellowship and how he applies that in his own business at Flowa’s website and blog.

A very common pattern in the software industry is to give the role of Scrum Master to Project Managers. This has many possible dangers, and Emilia knows that. That’s why she has developed a specific approach to hiring Scrum Masters, a people-centric approach.

About Emilia Breton-Lake

Emilia is a natural-born Agile thinker who managed to swim out of the PMI waterfall almost a decade ago. As the head of the PMO at a major non profit she is constantly looking for new ways to build better software and make the world a better place.
She has also been working on 2 major innovations, On going retrospectives, and #NoNumbers where they have eliminated sizing of stories. They still groom and plan, but don’t assign sizes to stories.
Emilia has worked hard to introduce Scrum and Agile to a non-profit that is very resistant to change.
You can link up with Emilia Breton-Lake on LinkedIn. Or follow Emilia Breton-Lake’s articles at the Scrum Alliance website.

Through failed attempts we develop our own approach to the recruiting process. In this episode Sven explains an exercise he developed over the years to help him detect the great Scrum Masters, and the not so great ones. He explains how you can identify the right skills and personality that fits the role of Scrum Master.

About Sven Schnee

Sven started his journey as a developer around the year 2000. He experienced many projects and felt the pain of how traditional approaches to software development failed.
A few years ago he discovered Agile and Lean, and he is not going back.
He is an Agile Coach and Founder of Oikosofy. He wants to bring agile ways of working to a variety of customers from small companies to big enterprises. One of his key strengths is helping teams evolve on their path to self-organization.
You can connect with Sven Schnee on twitter, and link with Sven Schnee on LinkedIn.
You can read Sven Schnee’s blog The Product Owner Toolbox.

Keeping a good recruiting track record when hiring many people is next to impossible. And the easy path, the interview, is the surest way to fail at hiring the right people. Why? Listen to this story of how a recruiting process went wrong even when everything seemed perfect.

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When recruiting there are many tools we can use. One of those tools is the interview, but that is not the only tool. Alexandre shares with us how they use “homework” as a tool to find really great developers.

About Alexandre Cuva

Former International Agile Coach, now CEO in charge of SmartDev an outsourcing company in Vietnam. In SmartDev Alexandre applies XP Programming practices within Agile/Lean Management. He has been worked with pragmatic, agile, lean, big, organic and team oriented organizations. Based upon his experiences, he understands that agile is a big experiment and in some peoples mind still is an unproven hypothesis.
He co-founded diverse agile communities in Switzerland like ScrumBeer, Stoos Satellite and now he is the co-founder of the Agile Community in Da Nang.
You can link up with Alexandre Cuva on LinkedIn, and find Alexandre Cuva on Twitter.

Hiring people that need to work with or within a team without involving the team in the hiring process can lead to missing critical “chemistry” issues between the team and the candidate. Marc asks us to think about involving the team in the process, and suggests how that can be done.
In this episode we also discuss the anti-pattern of focusing on planning and execution and missing other aspects of team and project development such as the technical environment, the collaboration aspects, etc.

About Marc Löffler

Marc’s passion is to help teams implementing agile frameworks like Scrum and XP and to transform our world of work. Marc loves to help teams, that are struggling with agile transitions, to overcome dysfunctional behaviour. He loves to generate new insights by approaching common problems from the other side and trying to deliberately make havoc of the process.
You can connect with Marc Löffler on Twitter, and link with Marc Löffler on LinkedIn.
He hosts a Blog in English and another blog in German.

Very often we fail to use tools and methods that are already available to help us succeed at the recruiting process. In this episode Sebastian shares two tools/methods he uses when recruiting people, plus tips on how to evaluate good developers.

About Sebastian Schürmann

Sebastian has an extremely strong work ethic, a great passion to his work, unwavering desire for excellence, and unabated willingness to share his rich knowledge.
Driven by his strong work ethic, he takes several key roles: as scrum master, agile coach, mentor, as protector of the young development teams, after all, a humble leader who takes risks and responsibilities at extremely critical moments, creates a vision which the other follow by heart – with excellent outcome.
You can find Sebastian Schürmann on twitter, and link with Sebastian Schürmann on LinkedIn.
You can find Sebastian Schürmann’s website, and his blog.